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So You Think You Want to be a Tour Manager ?

By Richard Goodman

So you think you want to be a tour manager, do you ?

Ah, the romance of travel ! See all those places you've always wanted to see but never had enough cash to visit -- with someone else footing the bill.

As someone who has accompanied dozens of tour groups, let me tell you that the reality of tour managing is utterly different. If you're going to be a tour manager, you need to consider the following:

1) You will ALWAYS be the first in your tour group to get up in the morning. If they arise at 5 to catch a flight, you must arise at 3:30.

You will also ALWAYS be the last to crawl into bed. It doesn't matter if you're taking a group through the villages of Fiji or on an itinerary that only includes five-star hotels in Bali.

2) The more luxurious the tour, the more likely it is that most of your clients will be thoughtless individuals who regard you as a temporary slave. (This does not mean that all wealthy individuals are thoughtless and spoiled. But a huge percentage are.) I recall talking with another tour manager when we were both leading groups in Bali and having this beautiful young lady describe her clients as "selfish, thoughtless pigs."

3) Even if you think you've seen every personality type in the world, one or more new ones will show up in your next group. Used to adults behaving like adults ? I remember one woman who, as soon as we got on the plane bound from Los Angeles to Tahiti, became totally dependent on me. She was unable to fill out her name on a customs form without directions from someone else. And it wasn't that she was stupid. It was just that she had psychological needs that only depending on others could satisfy.

Then, there was the belligerent psychiatrist from New York who decided he could take out all his frustrations on me. He demanded (unsuccessfully) that the tour itinerary be changed and that a hotel manager be bribed to kick out another tour group already settled into the hotel so that ours could be accommodated. (I don't do windows or bribes.)

4) Get used to things not going the way they are supposed to go. Develop a way of dealing with this. If your group has plane reservations from country A to country B, and you are staying on a remote island without a phone, it could happen -- as it once did to me -- that an airline changed their take-off time two days ago and couldn't tell you. What do you do when you arrive just in time to see your flight soaring off into the horizon without you ?

How do you deal with this ? Take your group back to a hotel, feed them wonderfully, and do your best to get them all drunk. If you've done your job skillfully, they'll fall into bed that night happy about the schedule mix-up.

5) Learn to avoid unnecessary psychological anguish. Do not get excited and all-out angry about something you cannot change. If your group isn't being waited upon satisfactorily in a restaurant, you can say something about it and maybe change the situation. But if the plane left early without you and your group, don't get excited, There's nothing you can do to change the situation.

6) Develop a detached attitude. If a client is bitterly complaining that his or her room is too small, and is blaming you, don't take it personally. The client is venting. Listen carefully for however long the rant requires. Then, if it is possible, try to get the room changed to a larger one. But if there are no larger rooms, go back to the client and explain this.

7) If you have to lower the boom seriously on a client, perhaps for making everyone else unhappy with perpetual complaints, remember group dynamics. Whatever serious action you take should be done by at least making a show of consulting the group's members, getting a consensus, and only then taking action. This is really a way of getting the group's permission.

I had a client once whose perpetual complaints about everything were making everyone else unhappy. He also stated that there wasn't a time in his life during the last few years when he wasn't suing "two or three" people, but had reviewed the full disclosures of our tour brochure and couldn't find anything to sue me about. I consulted the others in the tour group, knowing full well what I was going to do, Once I had them on my side, I refunded most of his money in cash and arranged for him to return to the country's capital to continue his vacation without us.

8) Remember that most tour members regard you as a servant. They will place extraordinary demands on you. They hold over your head the idea that the size (or absence) of the tip they will give you at the end of the tour will make you endlessly kow-tow. You can circumvent this, at least if you are working for a small company or travel agency, by insisting on building your pay into the total tour cost. That way you can behave normally and require at least a minimum of respect from your clients.

Obviously you should never tell your clienmts that you have done this. This deprives them of the pleasure of thinking you are totally at their mercy.

In the dozens of tours I have managed, only once did a tour group not tip me. This was a group of New York psychiatrists. Having built my fee into the tour cost (I had put the tour together), I laughed all the way to the bank.

Still want to be a tour manager ?

Contributor's Note

For more than a decade I owned and operated a travel company that specialized in taking groups of travelers to remote places in the South Pacific and Asia. The intel presented here is drawn from my experiences doing this.

Ha! This was so great! I've never been a tour manager, but I have worked as a head usher in a theater for a number of years. For high brow shows such as the opera, many of the clientele treat you as servants. Not all, but many. It's the same with all customer service type gigs, though a tour manager gig appears to be more glamorous on its face (exotic locations and all)... Ah, the joys of customer service...

Thanks, James. You are so right. People in customer service of any kind need to develop thick skins so they never take anyuthing personally -- even when psychiatrists are trying to penetrate your psychological armor.

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